“There are always parts of a person’s life story that are fascinating. You just have to dig,” says star speechwriter Matt Kivel, whose digging skill and determination has yielded a great deal of rhetorical gold for his clients over the years.

In this 90-minute session, Matt will teach you how to:

• Build a sufficient rapport to get your reticent speaker to let the guard down. (While making the strategic case for storytelling.)
• Dig deep. How to ask all the right questions (and none of the wrong ones) to maximize every moment you get with the speaker, tapping into his or her true interests and life story quickly and accurately.
• Guide your speaker gently, by constructing appealing narrative fragments before you even sit down to write your first draft.
• Construct a complete story, or weave seemingly disparate stories together, in a way that feels natural and remarkably compelling.
• Show the speaker that he or she can trust you to know and respect the difference between confidential counsel and candid communication.
• Write stories sensitively and learn when to push your speaker and when to pull back. Speechwriting is a collaboration and a balancing act, and storytelling is the most personal version.

INSTRUCTOR: Matt Kivel is a Speechwriter to the President, the University of Texas at Austin. The grand winner of the 2018 Cicero Speechwriting Awards for a speech on the power of storytelling, Kivel draws on his previous experience as a speechwriter in the aerospace industry and as a journalist in the entertainment industry.